Partnership of U.S.-Israeli companies offers new self-destructing drone capability for soldiers

New self-destructing drones, developed by U.S. and Israeli military contractors, will soon be in the hands of Army soldiers.

Defense industry insiders say the HERO-120 system could help fill a precision strike gap in current U.S. capabilities — a gap highlighted by the Russia-Ukraine war, which has seen heavy use of various loitering munitions, more commonly known as “suicide” or “kamikaze” drones. The HERO system was brought to the U.S. through a partnership of Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), an American company with decades of work in the defense sector, the Mistral Group and Israel-based UVision.

Its developers said they’ve ramped up the timeline to get the system into soldiers’ hands even faster than the Army anticipated.

“What we’re going to provide the Army is really something that they wanted to have in two to three years,” Eyal Banai, an adviser with Mistral Group, told The Washington Times in an exclusive interview. “We are going to give it to them in 18 months.”

Mr. Banai spoke to The Times at the Association of the U.S. Army conference in downtown Washington this week. The sprawling exhibition floor of that convention was filled with drones, including loitering munitions systems, and counter-drone weapons designed to defeat them. The U.S. is in the midst of a major push to build and field huge numbers of small drones in the coming years, with officials throughout the Pentagon acknowledging that such systems will be a central part of 21st-century warfare.

SAIC, the Mistral Group and UVvision have secured a nearly $1 billion contract to provide the HERO system to soldiers. They’re also competing for contracts in another Army program, the Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance, or LASSO, initiative. That program, the Army has said, aims to field new capabilities to engage “armor vehicles, hardened targets, defilade targets, [and] personnel targets at extended ranges,” with the goal of giving soldiers more safety in large-scale combat scenarios.

The Army wants platforms it can place directly into the hands of soldiers on the ground. The LASSO program could lead to a new class of loitering munitions — part drone, part missile — for the Army. Those munitions could prove highly valuable during future conflicts in a crowded battlespace, such as a potential clash with China in the Pacific.

The concept of a loitering munition, which is essentially a self-destructing drone, has come to the forefront over the past several years. A soldier can launch the HERO-120 or another loitering munition, let it fly independently over a target, and attack from near vertical due to its unique “cruciform wings.” That can defeat much of the protection seen on tanks and other armored vehicles.

Ukrainian soldiers have used such systems to great effect in strikes against Russian tanks, especially during the early months of the war between the two sides.

The HERO-120 drone is also likely to feel familiar to some U.S. service members. They are roughly the same size as the Army’s current Javelin missile system, serving a similar purpose but with more flexibility for the soldier. It carries reconnaissance technology and interchangeable modules for different missions, using multiple “mission payloads” that can be modified by a soldier in the field.

Pulling off the warhead nose cone of the drone, without tools, a soldier can configure the platform for different uses.

Mistral Group and UVision’s partnership with SAIC is accelerating the timeline for soldiers to be able to use the munition, allowing technology that’s already been developed in Israel over the past decade to be adapted to meet U.S. requirements. They see the collaboration as helping to significantly reduce the amount of research and development time, cutting costs for the military while also producing a return for investors.

“Most importantly, you are providing the operator a very unique capability to the toolbox much faster,” Mr. Banai said.

The system isn’t just designed for the U.S. UVision continued to modify the HERO throughout its last five years of development, focusing on building a modular open-systems approach to meet the requirements of many allied countries around the world. They have “29 different customers in over 22 nations,” according to Mr. Tal Givoly, the chief innovation officer at UVision.

“Each of them, almost, gets a different warhead, a different GPS, a different radio,” he said. “So we’ve lived modularity in practice.”

That flexibility is a key draw for the U.S. military as it steers many of its procurement programs into a more modular direction, letting the military avoid getting bogged down in contracts that don’t keep pace as technology advances.

The HERO system isn’t exclusively ground-based either. A Blackhawk helicopter-based launch of the HERO-120 was successfully tested late last month.

The partnership with SAIC is also helping to develop it for maritime use at their Charleston, South Carolina, location. The goal is to expand use by Naval Special Warfare along with their already established contracts across U.S. Special Operations Command and the Army.

“This offers us a business-to-business arrangement, where we can help bring best-in-class technology” to the Defense Department, said Josh Sorkin, a senior vice president at SAIC.

“With the same rigor, quality control and production that’s expected, yet bring the most incredible technology from Israel,” he said.

Asymmetric and special operations units were drawn to the low signature to launch the weapon. The system can use compressed air to initially launch, making it very difficult for even advanced enemy equipment to see where one of the munitions was launched from.

“You don’t have any signature upon launch,” said Yoav Banai, a vice president at Mistral. “It sounds just like a Champagne cork popping.”